Shamika Ravi

Dr. Shamika Ravi’s research is in the area of Development Economics with a focus on gender inequality and democracy, and financial inclusion and health. She also serves as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indian School of Business, where she teaches courses on Game Theory and Microfinance. She is also a Faculty Affiliate at the Financial Access Initiative of New York University. She is part of the Enforcement Directorate of Microfinance Institutions Network in India and has serves as a director on boards of several microfinance institutions. Professor Ravi has published extensively in academic journals and writes regularly in leading newspapers.

Her research work has been featured and cited by BBC, The Guardian, The Financial Times and several leading Indian newspapers and magazines.

There is more to manufacturing than building things. Manufacturing is the production of physical goods while design involves the way in which people construct products, devise business processes, and think about service delivery for society as a whole. Therefore design is a vital part of economic development, system operations, and overall quality of life. Relying upon the principles of creativity, functionality, and user-friendliness, design can offer tremendous opportunities to create jobs, boost small- and medium-sized enterprises and improve trade balances.

The Modi government has made a serious attempt to address agrarian distress in India by announcing the crop insurance scheme last week. It is imperative, however, that we learn from the mistakes of other countries and urgently fine-tune this simple product to make it financially viable in the long run. And the fine-tuning is easy -- instead of measuring the crop losses of farmers let us just measure the performance of the rain gods!

The basic result of our regression analysis indicates that there is no obvious reduction in the level of any of the pollutants measured by the Central Pollution Control Board in Delhi after the odd-even rule was implemented. These results indicate that perhaps the Delhi government is barking up the wrong tree.